Frugal Living 2011 - the preparation stage

complimentschemistry

Hi all,

Firstly, can I just say that this is a fantastic idea and I'm definately in on this! I have around £5k of debts to pay off in 2011 and I'm going to be saving to move out in 2012, so my budget is as follows...

• Debtors in total - £5,400
• Moving out - £1,000
• Bank account - £174
• Leisure - £1,200 (includes b'days, Xmas and the like)
• Petrol - £1,200
• Gym - £225 (only until May when I can cancel!)
• Phone - £540
• Rent - £1140 (living at home comes in handy for budgeting!)
• Car insurance/maintenance/MOT/etc - £1500

And any left overs I'm going to try and save!

Good luck to everyone else who's trying this

BinkyTheHorse

Hello Natalie

Originally Posted by BinkyTheHorse
Can I please join in with the 2011 challenge? I have been lurking on the thread over this last year and feel really inspired by all of you

My budget for the year will be £7850 for the seven of us - 5 children, 2 adults and a dog.

Broken down, it looks like this:

Groceries, toiletries, cleaning and laundry £2600 - that is amazing! Any tips on how to get budget this low for 5 kids and 2 adults would be much appreciated

Almost any tips that I can offer have been picked up on this site, lol! All the usual stuff such as cooking from scratch if it works out to cost less, bulk buying any special offers and avoiding buying as much junk as possible. I think that planning ahead has been very helpfull - I have a meal plan that covers several weeks and I try to stick to it, adapting it for any special offers and whoopsies that I come across.

We get our fruit and veg delivered weekly from G&S (a huge box for less than £20) and bulk this out with whoopsies, growing as much as possible, buying up and freezing a lot of the special offers in Lidl and Aldi and foraging.

I think that our biggest saving comes from our being vegetarian. Once a year a group of us put in an order from SUMA and through this I get a years worth of pulses and soya mince much, much cheaper than it would cost to buy from the shops - this saves us an absolute fortune! I try not to buy meat substitutes such as Quorn as they really bump the cost up.

Clothing and footwear £150 - is this for all 7! That is amazing too. I spend that on each child just for school uniform and school shoes - would appreciate any tips on lowering our own budget (i think mine is on page 3 or 4..... here somewhere lol)

Hand me downs! A couple of my friends in particular seem to spend a kings ransome on clothes for their children - buying far too many items so that most hardly get worn. Every now and then I get offered a bin liner full after they have had a clearout! I have boxes in the loft that are labeled boy/girl and the age and any clothes that don't fit at the time are put away in these boxes for when they will, adding my own childrens clothes as they grow out of them so that they can be passed on to the next one down. I keep a list of clothes needed in my bag and keep an eye on the charity shops for these items - trying to think a season or two ahead is really helpful with this.

We home educate four of the children, so I only have to buy school uniform for my son who attends school. I buy trainers at £5 a time from ASDA and these last a couple of months - the kids prefer to wear them, the last pair of shoes I bought for one of the children was for when he needed to dress formally - he only wore them the once

Doggy costs - vets & food £200 - what dog do you have?? Does that include insurance?? I have a jug (tiny jack russell/pug) and he is gonna cost me about 360 year! For insurance, food and saving to cover excess if needed.

We have a Springer Spaniel. The above is for her boosters, worming and flea treatment etc. She isn't insured. She is a small Springer - half the size of Springers I've owned in the past and she eats half as much as well (I am suspicious that somewhere down her line there was another ingredient added! )

Looking at this figure, I do think that I should bump it up a little.

** OK, I stopped typing at this point and went off and found this last years worth of vet bills - I'm upping this part of my budget to £350! Thanks for drawing my attention to this as otherwise I would have been severely overbudget **

Kids activities £223 - is that for school trips and things?

This is for activities within our local home ed group, such as ice-skating and swimming ( we book as a group and get school rates on these) My wonderful Uncle buys us a years membership to English Heritage each Christmas and we make sure we visit any free museums wherever we go - this keeps our Home ed costs quite low. I am paying for my 15 year olds exams in several subjects, but this comes out of our savings.

Breakdown cover £170 - i cancelled my AA last year and am taking it out again in jan as i can go through top cash back and get it cheaper - i imagine yours is for 2 ppl tho...

Yes, we have two ppl covered. I'm with the AA and last years quote was for around £240, but I found out that the RAC were offering a great discount for new customers (about £130 for a similar package) so I phoned the AA and they matched it. The lady who I spoke to advised me to do this every year as they would almost always try to keep people with long membership At the moment I can get the same cover with RAC for £131, So allowing £170 is quite generous for the time being (fingers crossed they keep the online discount so I have something to bargain with in April )

Thank you for your reply - it made me double check all the figures and got me to pick up a on a couple of things

I'm wondering if I should up the groceries budget by £5 a week........at the moment I know that I can manage on that with a lot of work, but there is little leeway and now that I've had another look at these figures, I'm thinking it might be best to allow for rising prices - everything seems to have gone up by so much this year..........

Sorry if I have messed up the quoting in this post - hope it isn't too confusing!:o

NualaBuala

Great post Binky! :T (I love your name by the way, reminds me of a Famous Five story, I think there was a pantomime horse called Binky in it.:D)

What kind of veggie mince do you use - is it the dried kind? Have only used frozen but my food co-op only has the dried kind and am not sure how to use it.

BinkyTheHorse

NualaBuala wrote: »

Great post Binky! :T (I love your name by the way, reminds me of a Famous Five story, I think there was a pantomime horse called Binky in it.:D)

lol! I've shamelessly nicked it from Terry Pratchett (who I am an obsessive fan of), it is the name that Death has given to his horse. He is supposed to have chosen it 'because it is a nice name.'

My doggy shares the name, too

NualaBuala wrote: »

What kind of veggie mince do you use - is it the dried kind? Have only used frozen but my food co-op only has the dried kind and am not sure how to use it.

I buy the dried kind. It is pretty bland and does need lots of 'ooomphing' up! I soak it in stock before I use it to add flavour to it - I make my own stock powder by drying out an assortment of veggies and pounding them to a powder and I use this if I'm making something like cottage pie. If I'm using it for taco filling or chilli type meals then I use the juice from a tin of tomatos and some tomato puree mixed with water, adding the spices I'm using in the meal - in order to get as much flavour into it as possible.

londonirish_3

Not very frugal of me but I bought from ebay, the laura ingles book one of you wrote about, the bleak midwinter, also I bought a book on frugal food, total came to 5.20 inc postage, I will take them on the plane on sunday , will have 5 hours to read. I am SERIOUSLY considering cutting out meat, I have been over to the vegan thread, this has interested me for years, but I am lazy minded sometimes and the thought of having to "learn" vegi cooking and the possible food we may waste worries me. when I say waste, I mean, cooking and it goes wrong, tastes awful.
xx

NualaBuala

BinkyTheHorse wrote: »

lol! I've shamelessly nicked it from Terry Pratchett (who I am an obsessive fan of), it is the name that Death has given to his horse. He is supposed to have chosen it 'because it is a nice name.'

My doggy shares the name, too

Oh I'd forgotten that - I love Terry Pratchett but only read one of his books years ago, Pyramids I think it was. Laughed myself sick! :rotfl:

I buy the dried kind. It is pretty bland and does need lots of 'ooomphing' up! I soak it in stock before I use it to add flavour to it - I make my own stock powder by drying out an assortment of veggies and pounding them to a powder and I use this if I'm making something like cottage pie. If I'm using it for taco filling or chilli type meals then I use the juice from a tin of tomatos and some tomato puree mixed with water, adding the spices I'm using in the meal - in order to get as much flavour into it as possible.

Mmmm, thanks for the advice. I'm trying to go veggie (I mostly am) so this helps a lot. Plus it's great to have a store of non-perishable food in.

londonirish_3

my thoughts on shopping,

I have done jans budget and it comes to £80

however I often pop in shops and see reduced items. I think jan i will do the monthly shop but feb i am going to withdraw £80 and walk to my shops 3 or 4 evenings a week specifically to only buy reduced bits, and ill see how it compares. I am sure it will be hit and miss and obviously some things I have never seen reduced, toilet rolls, cat litter etc. I live about half a mile from asda so the walk will do me good. however I wont be getting a taxi so my bargains will have to fit in my primark cotton bag lol.

NualaBuala

londonirish wrote: »

Not very frugal of me but I bought from ebay, the laura ingles book one of you wrote about, the bleak midwinter, also I bought a book on frugal food, total came to 5.20 inc postage, I will take them on the plane on sunday , will have 5 hours to read. I am SERIOUSLY considering cutting out meat, I have been over to the vegan thread, this has interested me for years, but I am lazy minded sometimes and the thought of having to "learn" vegi cooking and the possible food we may waste worries me. when I say waste, I mean, cooking and it goes wrong, tastes awful.
xx

Hopefully the money you'll save from frugal food will make up for it!:D

I'm trying to eat as much veggie and vegan food as possible. The things I find hardest are the "hidden" things like in Worcestershire sauce, gelatine and certain e-numbers. And I have found it very hard when in company. But I have decided just to keep doing the best I can and not stress about my failures. Hopefully over time it will get easier.

Kiwisaver_2

My, you've all had busy fingers on the new thread and I had a bit of catching up to do. :eek: Hi, to all the familiar 'faces' and welcome to the new ones. :T

I'm back in for 2011 and going to stick with the same budget of NZ$15,000 for the year. That's for me OH and two kitties. This time last year that was the equivalent of £6k, but with all the woes of the world's financial markets and currency devaluations etc. it seems to be equate to about £7k at the moment.

I found 2010 not unbearably tough on NZ$15k, but we did have a hike in VAT in October so that means I'll have to work a bit harder to try to somehow mitigate that in 2011, plus I have added a new category for yoga classes that I started a few months back weren't planned for in 2010.

I'm on the Olympic challenge to pay off debt by July 2012 and will have paid off approximately half of it this past year, so I am secretly aiming to make it a gone burger before the end of 2011. Hopefully then we can actually start to save some money and move house in 2012.

NualaBuala

Kiwi, just wanted to say Good Luck with the Olympic Challenge. I'm trying to do something similar and thanks to the Frugal Challenge I will have cleared my loan by the end of 2011 instead of March 2013. I could have done it a bit sooner but I diverted a bit of money into an emergency savings fund.